I took the opportunity of a long weekend to visit Concord, a town located 18 miles west-northwest of Boston, and the first inland settlement in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, incorporated in 1635. It lies along the Fitchburg line, a part of the Massachusetts Commuter Rail (www.mbta.com) which runs from Boston’s North Station to Wachusett, a popular hiking and skiing destination in Fitchburg.

We were lucky with the weather and the sun shone on our journey inland, the trees a vibrant red and yellow. Boston had been unseasonably warm for late October and we were told the fall colours would not have reached their peak yet, but for two Australians used to evergreens in subtropical Brisbane we were more than satisfied with the display.

With a population just over 17,500 people, Concord, Massachusetts has been named the ‘biggest small town in America.’ And it is true, as one would be hard pressed to find a town of that size with such richness of history and sheer multitude of remarkable past inhabitants.

It takes approximately 40 minutes by train to reach Concord which lies on the Concord River, where the Sudbury and Assabet Rivers join. The area was called Musketaquid by the Native Americans who used the area’s rivers for transportation and food.

We booked our accommodation through Airbnb and stayed in a loft studio above Main Street’s Grist Mill which lies along the Mill Brook. It was home to the town’s original Mill, but now houses the Main Street’s Cafe and Market on the ground level, and an antique shop on the second floor.

We travelled light and walked from the Concord train station at Thoreau Street to our accommodation, taking around 10 minutes with occasional stops for pictures of squirrels and delightful decorative Halloween pumpkins lining fence posts and the beams above front doors. Some locals had gone further and covered trees and balconies in fabric cobwebs and spiders.

While generally organised and security orientated, when my husband Dylan and I travel, we like to leave most things unplanned. We do arrange the bare minimum such as our accommodation and the ticket to our destination, but when it comes to anything further we enjoy room to explore whatever catches our fancy once we get there.

We arrived around noon, dumped our bags in the very comfortable loft, and peeled out of our jackets which were wholly unnecessary at this point. The air was crisp but the sun shone warmly on our legs and back as we made our way to the Information Centre conveniently located about 20 steps from our front door.

This is where we met the first of the very friendly locals. He had been an official tour guide of the town in the past and poured over maps with us showing us the most interesting spots and providing some history with each.

We decided on a guided town tour at 1pm and went to have lunch at the Main Street Cafe in the meantime. The food was good and hearty, and the atmosphere cosy. The town tour included about 8 people, ourselves and a very informative tour guide.

There are two places from this tour that have stuck in my mind. One was the Sleepy Hollow cemetery (not the location of Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ which is set in a prior Dutch settlement known as Tarry Town in New York) and the Old North Bridge with the Minute Man.

The cemetery is where many remarkable locals have been laid to rest, and among them members of the Alcott family, and the Hoar dynasty, William Channing, Ralph Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daniel Chester French and Henry Thoreau. The authors ridge showed many pens and pencils stuck in the ground around the tombstones, placed there by fans to honour their literary idols. Dylan placed a pen in the empty ground next to Sophia Thoreau’s headstone and I will explain why.

The tour guide stopped in front of Thoreau’s grave and described details of the author’s life and the family members also buried with him. To the left of the large family headstone were the smaller stones of first Sophia and then Henry.

As the tour guide was talking, a man dapperly dressed in a bow tie, and not part of our group, waited politely for the tour guide to finish before unleashing his very interesting news on us.

He explained that the headstones of Henry and Sophia Thoreau were stolen and then replaced in the early 1900s. Photographs from before they were stolen showed that in fact Sophia may lie buried under Henry’s tombstone and Henry under Sophia’s. More investigation is necessary and the man was off to discuss this with fellow Thoreau enthusiasts at the conveniently timed Thoreau convention that weekend.

Some of his enthusiasm spilled over to the group and we were excited to see Daniel Chester French, the sculptor’s grave next. However, it was as the tour guide warned us unspectacular. Perhaps someone could take it upon themselves to honour the sculptor who gave America the Lincoln Memorial with a fitting headstone?

The other location that was remarkable was the Old North Bridge. The site of the Battle of Concord, it is the location of the first day of battle in the American War of Independence.

The Minuteman statue, erected near the bridge, and one of the works by Daniel Chester French depicts a farmer. As we stood to read the inscription pertaining to the well known phrase from Emerson’s 1837 Concord Hymn about the shot heard around the world, a man walked down the gravel path from the park singing the German anthem. He then proceeded to tell us that he could sing national songs in over 30 different languages and threatened revocation of the American citizenship for those not joining into the star spangled banner.

Whilst listening to the American anthem and looking past the Minute Man to the battlefield of the past, I had a strange feeling shift in me. I understood for the first time, though not completely American patriotism. I pictured the farmers, fighting for their freedom, refusing to pay taxes to an unknown and unrelated entity three thousand miles away.

Being German, I am deeply ashamed of my birth countries past. While I am aware all countries have bloody pasts, I tend to shy away from patriotism, on the caution that it should get out of hand. But what happened in Germany is like all good things twisted. Patriotism in and of itself is not evil, but it can be used to evil ends. I felt the good, unblemished part on the field that day – the pride of the people holding their hand over their heart and singing about a country where they are free.

As we walked back towards Concord past the clergy house, the Old Manse, I pondered about gun laws interspersed by jumping in heaps of deliciously crunchy autumn leaves.

Just like getting slightly closer to what an American feeling passionate about their country may experience, I also felt I reached a closer understanding for their adamance about owning guns for personal use. Their history is entrenched in being lorded over by British regiments thwarting their freedom, culminating in a rebellion only possible with the taking up of arms.

Statistically I still think it is a bad idea to allow such free access to firearms but I perhaps better understand the emotion, the fear that lies behind listening to a government wanting civilians to hand in their guns. The second day we had a leisurely breakfast and then walked to visit Orchard House.

One of my favourite authors wrote Little Women, a semi-autobiographical book about her life in Orchard house with her sisters. We took a wonderful tour through the Alcott house learning about this unusual family who allowed one daughter to draw on her bedroom walls to develop her artistic talent. We viewed the chest of clothes which features so prominently in the book Little Women, and that Jo and her sisters (and Louisa and her sisters in real life) use to dress up and put on plays for family and friends. Though their friends were also rather unique, among them the likes of Thoreau and Emerson.

I learnt a lot more about Louisa’s upbringing and where her ideas, so far ahead of her time, particularly regarding the role of women stemmed from. It seems her parents were particularly influential. Her father Amos Alcott was a teacher and philosopher who pioneered education, was an abolitionist, and an advocate for women’s rights. Interestingly he also had very strict house rules, a list of which hangs in his bedroom, including instructions that no sister may swap her chores with another sister, and that only complete obedience would be tolerated.

As we walked back towards Concord, we passed a small garage-like shed and luckily Dylan spotted the sign stating it was the Concord Independent Battery Gun House. We remembered the advice from the man at the Information Centre that a walk to Walden Pond started just behind this House.

It is hard to find if you don’t know where to look but if you’d rather walk 1.7 miles than drive to Walden Pond, the route starts just behind the Battery Gun House on Lexington Road, before the Cambridge Turnpike turnoff.

Paper maps were available after walking across the field behind the gun house (Heywood Meadow) and I’m glad we took one out of the self serve plastic box as the Emerson-Thoreau Amble that leads to Walden Pond is just one of a criss-cross of other hiking paths.

The trail is the path Emerson and Thoreau took to get from Emerson’s house to Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. Both authors were major figures of the Transcendentalist movement, a philosophical movement that arose in be eastern United States around 1830.

The transcendentalists held beliefs about the goodness of people and nature, and directly opposed society’s institutions which they believed corrupted that inherent purity. It emerged from a culmination of English and German romanticism, the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German idealism, as well as Hindu spirituality.

The trail passed through the swampy area around the Mill Brook, with mud squelching under our feet, the ground soft and boggy from the rain in the past week. Several signs warned that this part of the trail may occasionally flood and I advise caution, and sturdy footgear.

Ralph Emerson’s House is visible from the trail just before reaching a wooden footbridge. This is where we met a delightful white dog. He ran right up to me, sniffed my hands once, and sat down on his back haunches. His owner had to call him several times to move on. My heart lifted, my senses amplified in the crisp clear air, the satisfying earthy smell of fallen leaves covering the ground, and the Mill Brook sparkled in the sun slanting through the bright red leaves.

We entered the Hapgood Wright Town Forest and soon found ourselves walking through thick pine forest. A small sign encourages walkers to add to a pile of sticks arranged to resemble the flow of a river along the ground on the forest floor.

When we reached Fairyland Pond, I remembered how according to our Alcott House guide, Thoreau had shown Louisa May Alcott a cobweb and asked her to describe it. Incredulous she’d answered it was what it was. Thoreau announced it was a fairy’s handkerchief and thus passed onto Louisa a new perspective, and a different way of seeing things.

After a short climb we had to cross MA route 2 and then find our way back onto the trail on the other side. It is then only a short walk to Walden pond and the site of Thoreau’s cabin, where he lived and pondered his existence for two years.

A collection of stones to remember Thoreau.

A quote from Thoreau is inscribed on wood: ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’ The foundations of Thoreau’s cabin can be seen in the background on the right. We walked around Walden pond, and along the beach to the visitors centre at the other end. We had only come across a handful of people on our amble, but as soon as we approached the area within a short walking distance of the car park, the crowds increased.

A wooden visitors centre housed an interactive display about Walden pond and Thoreau, and next to it a gift shop contained an assortment of books and knick knacks mostly related to the author. As we weaved through the crowds to get back out the doors the irony struck me.

Thoreau describes the solitude of Walden pond, his aim to escape the trivialities of society, and as he puts it ‘the petty things this entails.’ The tourist hot spot it has become, where most drive to a car park, walk a few metres to stand on the edge of Walden pond, then buy a souvenir and get back in their car, somehow seems at odds with Thoreau’s goals, or at least what he sought.

Concord was absolutely gorgeous and surprisingly complex. It is such an easy distance from Boston and I would guess picturesque in all seasons, not just fall. The slowness of the small town was relaxing, but there was certainly enough to do and see for two days. We will be back.